Friday, March 2, 2012

no bootable device - gpt

Some legacy BIOS's may have an issue with a GPT partitioned drive.

Ran across this recently with an Intel D975XBX board. I GPT partitioned a drive with gdisk, installed Ubuntu and when I rebooted after the install completed with surprised to see "No Bootable Device..." displayed.

The fix is this case was to mark the partition bootable using fdisk - it seems that the BIOS will complain as above unless it sees such a partition.

In this case wasn't large enough to mandate using GPT, it was just a preference.